Farmstead Meatsmith: Mobile Butchery in Washington State

By Andrew Plotsky on August 3, 2011

When Brandon Sheard brings his knife across the throat of a sheep, his movements are swift and precise. The sheep, lying calmly on her side in the pasture on which she has lived her whole life, gently closes her eyes. Brandon rests his hand on her throat and offers a prayer of gratitude to affirm the sacrifice of her life.

Brandon and his wife Lauren are the proprietors of Farmstead Meatsmith, a small business on Vashon Island, WA, that provides the services of slaughter, butchery, and charcuterie to small farmers in the Puget Sound region, as well as classes in slaughter and butchery. Read more

My New Year’s Resolution

By Curt Ellis on January 5, 2009

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…. They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

It can be easy to forget that food comes from somewhere. Those of us who eat animals tend to like it that way. For that reason, for most of my life, I’ve done my hunting in the deli case, training my shopping cart on plastic-wrapped livestock at rest in a Styrofoam pasture. Read more

Putting Our Votes Where Our Mouths Are: Slow Food Advocates and Prop 2

By Paul Shapiro on August 5, 2008

The plight of the animals we raise for food in this country rarely enters the forefront of our societal consciousness, but Californians are about to learn a whole lot more about what these animals go through when election season kicks off this fall. Read more

Slaughterhouse Diary

By Jerusha Klemperer on June 24, 2008

I am a city girl born and bred, with city needs and city habits. My junior year of college, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I took a course called “Religion and Ecology,” in which we read everything from the Jewish laws of kashruth to Buddhist texts; Heidegger’s “Technology;” to “The Monkey-Wrench Gang.” At the end of the course I vowed to spend time on a farm, to look a chicken in the eye as it died, to bear witness to the slaughter of a cow, something that would earn me the right to eat one of these sentient beings. Read more